Why we need to stop blaming women for the falling birth rate

This week, a spate of reports was released about Britain’s falling birth rate, full of head-scratching prose on why it has reached its lowest level since before World War II. The subject of women was front and centre: what we have and haven’t been doing with ourselves in the decades since the Baby Boomers. We have been taking the contraceptive pill and getting jobs and, according to the author of No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children, Paul Morland, living “all kinds of lifestyles” instead of pushing out babies.

What was surprisingly absent in all of this was any acknowledgement of what the world has been up to since the age of the Baby Boomer: stagnating wages, rising property prices and childcare costs to unattainable levels. Just as we once blamed the millennial predilection for avocado toast on that generation’s inability to afford a house, instead of looking at the insurmountable gap between flatlining wages and soaring property values, it seems we are looking everywhere but where we should be for the falling birth rate.

To me, the answer as to why the birth rate is falling is that so many people are simply being priced out of it. Like home ownership, it has become a fiscal nightmare. Having children is not an issue that can be looked at in a vacuum, it is intimately connected to all the crises of our time: the cost of living, the unaffordable housing market and yes, for some, the climate crisis, which makes many feel it may be unethical to procreate.

Instead, having babies is discussed as though it was something that modern women (and only women) have grown tired of doing, as though procreation has become unfashionable or something out of kilter with our fabulous lifestyles of expensive shoes and wild sex lives. This is not only eye-rollingly reductive, but fails to see that for many millennial women, it is as straightforward as not having a job that covers the cost of childcare (the UK has the second most expensive childcare costs in the world) or a home that is not subject to the whims of a rogue landlord, in which to actually place the child. It is, in fact, precisely because women are making responsible assessments of how they could, or couldn’t, look after another human being.

Ironically, this rhetoric also serves as a prime example of another deterrent when it comes to having children. Our perception tilt when it comes to parenting is so slow moving that women are still shouldering everything when it comes to raising a family and, according to these reports, all the responsibility for having or not having babies in the first place…

Because, without fail, the birth rate—falling or rising—is squarely associated with women. Women are having babies at the lowest rate since before World War II… the rate has particularly fallen among women in their twenties. There is a lot to unpack here, but what strikes me immediately is how unaware I was of my ability to impregnate myself. If only those women who have spent thousands on freezing their eggs had known they could somehow internally procreate without any external assistance. If only it was more widely acknowledged that we had this magical capacity, what untold knotty relationship dilemmas it may solve.

The unthinking symbiosis of women and babies in our societal mind’s eye, aided by this grossly unhelpful public rhetoric, is tiresome at best and pernicious at worst. The notion that it is a woman who has a child, and not a couple, or at least the necessary combination of two different genetic materials, is not just a lazy—perhaps convenient—muddying of basic science, but one which has far-reaching societal consequences. In consistently centring women in the conversation around the falling birth rate, we are painted—absurdly—as the culpable party and the crisis is also relegated to a ‘woman’s issue.’

We know what happens when we thus relegate. We need only look at the gender health gap; the lack of funding for, and research of, anything relating to female health; the abysmal data on how women’s—and particularly women of colour’s—pain is understood, respected and treated, to know that such a perception is a demotion in real terms. I often wonder whether, if men could give birth, how swiftly we would see a revolution in pre- and post-natal care. If we ever properly acknowledged that men are parents too, I wonder how swiftly we might see a revolution in childcare costs, how high up the political agenda these issues—the real issues that are stagnating the birth rate—may rise.

Because of course, this unhelpful consignment continues long after childbirth and causes a devastating ripple effect. You could see this so clearly when the news broke last year that the government would be offering some free childcare for children under three years old. It was heralded as a triumph for women and working mothers. Yes, this acknowledged that women disproportionately shoulder caring responsibilities, but it never stopped to consider that, in presenting this as solely a boon for women, it reinforces this reality—a reality we in fact wish to shift. Why do we think women bear these responsibilities so excessively? One key reason is that we stubbornly refuse to see a world in which they don’t, because we underscore that imbalance by never mentioning men when we talk about children.

For where are men in this conversation? From conception to schooling they are nowhere in the endless head scratching about how to solve our falling birth rate, our childcare crisis, our gender pay gap, the dearth of women in senior management positions. It is not that they do not wish to join—so many do—it is that society, by thus aligning women with children so regularly, fails to even acknowledge that it is also their conversation to have.

Lead image: Andrew Schwartz/Paramount/Dreamworks/Kobal/Shutterstock

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